Piezoelectric Artillery Coating (PAC) for Energy Harvesting

Current 155 mm artillery shell fuzes and other power electronics utilize small lithium-ion batteries as a power supply during flight. These batteries have limited shelf life and take up valuable internal space. Replacing these batteries with a piezoelectric coating can alleviate these issue by harvesting energy from the detonation and flight to generate usable electricity. PSI proposes applying a piezoelectric coating to the outside surface of the shell. Upon firing these large forces would cause transient deformations in the coating to generate electricity. This will then be sent to the fuze to power sensors and other electronics. The piezoelectric coating will require less internal space than batteries and will not have a limited shelf life thus reducing the dependence on batteries. The piezoelectric coating does not harvest energy from viscus drag on the shell so it does not reduce the munition’s range. PSI will demonstrate that our coating can produce approximately 10 mW of low noise DC power at between 1 V and 5 V.